You Will Find Your People: How to Make Meaningful Friendships as an Adult

by Lane Moore

If you’ve survived a Greek myth–esque series of relational disappointments, you know that trying to figure out how to make a friend when you’ve been hurt so many times, or never really felt loved or accepted in a lasting way, or never had a model of healthy friendship, can feel impossible.

react to someone in a way that feels foreign to you. Because we are all a unique combination of needs, and past hurts, and what we did or didn’t get as children, which directly informs what we need now, and what we’re able to tolerate, for better or worse.

Above all, your friendships should allow you to feel safe and to feel seen, and do whatever is required to make you feel that way, and if a person can’t or won’t do that for you, you are absolutely allowed to walk away. Perhaps without judgment, without an indictment that they’re bad, but resolute in the knowledge that you deserve to have whatever you need to have.

Friendships require so much timing, luck, communication, and puzzle-piece compatibility that any two people who make it to the promised land of true friendship are almost heroic.

The more you know about yourself and your patterns, the better equipped you are to home in on what you truly want and need from your friends, and to know how to spot it.

1. Message someone you constantly interact with online.

2. Write to a mutual friend who you’ve always felt like you’d get along with.

3. Go to cool shows or restaurants alone.

4. Make plans outside of work with that coworker who you think is cool.

5. Reach out to someone you only see in drinking situations to do something non-drinking during the day.

6. Invite your friends’ significant others to stuff.

7. Go to a dog park.

8. Try putting more effort into the friendships you have.

9. Encourage yourself to make/keep plans with your friends, even though sitting inside alone watching friendships on TV seems way better.

You deserve to have friendships in which the conversation is easy, and you feel seen.

You deserve to have friendships where there’s an equal give and take. Friends who understand you, and you have FUN, true, silly little kid fun

“I rarely meet men in real life as extraordinary as ones on film, and rarely see women on film as extraordinary as ones I know in real life.”

But I want the certainty I’d assumed I would have by now. To be able to dial a number, and know they’ll pick up. To be able to text someone something and have them know exactly what I need at that moment. To have someone do everything in their power to prop me up, just as much as I do them. Someone to walk through life with.

To admit publicly that you don’t really have friends, that you haven’t found your people yet, that you’ve had a lot of the wrong people in your life, is so visceral that I can feel it when I talk about it. I can feel the judgment, the “we don’t dare speak of that” formality of the rules we’re asked to follow.

And because we rarely see people talk about friendship breakups, we’ve internalized that it is better to remain in a friendship that isn’t working, lest we commit the cardinal sin of ending it.

It takes so much vulnerability, in some ways so much more than in a romantic relationship, to say, “Hey, here’s what I want our relationship to look like and feel like. Do you want that too?” The anxiety of this concept is so intense.

I want your warm, but it will only make me colder when it’s over. —Fiona Apple, “Love Ridden”

trauma can make you feel like you’re weird, unlike anyone else, and no one could possibly relate to you or see you and give you what you need.

Empathy is the currency of people who’ve been there, and wish things had gone differently.

When you love someone, expanding that empathy for your loved one who may be going through something you don’t understand, should come with the territory.

Finding someone with whom you can just drop all that—the overwhelming exhaustion of trying to be fine and perfect and normal, as defined by very antiquated standards—was extremely liberating.